Death becomes her
Make no bones about it, award- winning former professor of Forensic Anthropology and Anatomy at Dundee University Sue Black is the go- to if you have a body part to identify, writes Janet Christie
Janet Christie bones up on forensics with Sue Black
“My bones are really boring,” says Forensic anthropologist, anatomist and academic Sue Black. “No real sharp force or ballistic trauma, no exotic diseases, nothing. I’m really very dull.”
This is her apology to Dundee University’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification where she wants her body to go after her death. There, in the facility she was part of creating, it will be dissected, embalmed, boiled down then hung as a skeleton in the dissecting room where she taught, so she can “continue to teach for the rest of her death.”
“They will tell I’m female, my ancestral origin as a Caucasian, my height, my age when I die, they will bear evidence of bones I have broken in the past, I suspect they will show evidence of my being of a post- menopausal age - they’re starting to thin with age, bit of arthritis in my toes, bit of a crick in my neck - but they’re pretty boring. I apologise to the anthropologists that have to look at me.“
But 59- year- old Black is far from dull, especially as she sits smiling in her wood- lined attic room with the north- east daylight flooding through the Velux window behind her as we Zoom.
The multi- award winning former professor of Forensic Anthropology and Anatomy at Dundee University and now Vice- Chancellor of engagement at Lancaster University, is the international go- to if you have a body part you need to identify, dead and often alive.
She’s worked in uncovering the stories behind the murdered, the missing, the abused, leading to those responsible being held to account
Her titles include OBE, dame, president, professor, chair, mum, granny, wife, daughter, not necessarily in that order. Labs and morgues, crime scenes and courtrooms, disaster zones, war torn territories are all the landscapes of her professional life, but this is Sue Black working from home.
She’s a hug of a woman, a riot of red curls trying to escape from a hair claw on the back of her head and crinkles zing out from behind her specs when she smiles. A silky blue scarf drapes around her neck and there are rings on each third finger of what is a safe pair of hands - if anybody was going to deal with your body after you’d left it, you’d want it to be her.
Today she’s telling me about her new book Written in Bone. It’s an addictively informative read about what we’re left with after death that she also manages to infuse with life. Along with the insight into those who make sense of trauma and tragedy, there are laugh out loud bits that are dead funny, such as a cracking story about a finger bone keyring lost and found in a lover’s tiff.
Inverness born, after human anatomy at Aberdeen university she went into forensic anthropology and anatomy. Increasingly her work took her into crime scenes and war zones - she was the lead anthropologist for the British Forensic Team’s work in war crimes investigations in Kosovo and she travelled to Thailand to identify the 2004 Tsunami dead. Decades of police work informed her BBC 2 series, History Cold Case.
Black’s book is aimed at a general audience, people who like non- fiction, partly inspired by the unlikely figure of Bruce Forsyth.
“On The Generation Game,” she says, “one of the games was drawing the liver or kidneys on a figure, and they were always wrong. Our research at Lancaster [ University] shows that people’s understanding of their own anatomy is very poor, and there’s a lack of understanding of the words used by GPS or in hospital, so I wanted to bring anatomy into the conversation as a general subject people could relate back to themselves.”
It’s clear Black’s interest in bones is professional: “I want to uncover the stories that are in remains,” But what about the rest of us? Are we just prurient and or is it natural human curiosity?
“Well, we are narcissistic. We are the species that developed the mirror so we can look at ourselves, and we like to look at other people. So the fact that stories are written in bones is intriguing.
“Recently I was speaking to somebody who had gone through trauma in their life who said they had never thought about their body recording those stories.
Black explains that trauma can cause Harris lines on the bones, which the body remodels over time until they disappear.
“This person got a huge sense of release knowing the body was removing these insults we go through in life. They got strength from the fact there is recovery from events that perhaps hold us back at times.”
Then there’s our voracious appetite for crime writing and TV. Is any of it realistic?
“Most of it is a lot less exciting. There’s a lot of standing around in the cold, head scratching, very few lightbulb moments at the crime scene. Crime writers do a lot of research so I have a lot of respect for them. For television it has to be moulded into 45 minutes and the story’s got to have a beginning, a middle and an end, even real crime documentaries. But often the work we do doesn’t have a conclusion. Sometimes it takes years. It’s a long game.”
Part of the power of Black’s book is her matter of fact rendition of the story her own body tells, the trauma as much as the joy of her three children. For example she talks about being raped as a nine year old by a stranger when her parents ran a hotel on Loch Carron. Why did she choose to be open about that now?
“I had no intention of writing that in the book. Often writers say when you are into a book, it starts to write itself. So when I was writing the section on the long bones, and was talking about being in the mortuary looking at the X- Ray of the child who had committed suicide, it seemed natural to talk about it.”
The link was that Black had spotted Harris lines on the child’s bones, markers of trauma, the regularity of which indicated an annual event, ultimately leading to the imprisonment of a relative who had looked after and abused the child when the parents were on holiday. Over time the lines disappear, but as the child had died close to the time of the abuse, they were still present.
So it was natural for me to say, “Did I have Harris lines? Yeah I probably did and they are no longer there because the bones will have remodelled themselves long ago. It wasn’t that I was trying to shock, or finally reveal. It was that at the age 59, it’s in the past.
“There’s the most wonderful quote in
The Lion King - I’m a great Disney fan, my girls were brought up on it - where Rafiki says ‘ Why worry? It’s in the past, it can’t hurt you.’
Because it’s happened. It carries on with you and you behave differently, but it can’t hurt you any more. So for me it’s the honest truth and it was just the next part of the story.”
“I’ve spent most of my professional life talking about professional things and as I’ve got older there comes a perspective which is a wonderful thing. The barriers you thought were there inside your head, of things you are willing to talk about, actually aren’t there.”
Professionally Black has seen forensic science develop hugely, especially in Scotland with much of that down to her Dundee University team. And despite the imbalance in the ratio of women to men in science, forensics is an exception.
“You are as likely to get to the top if you are a woman as you are as a man and the majority of senior academics in forensic anthropology are all female,” she says.
What’s interesting is how such an experienced anthropologist can still be squeamish.
“I hate feet,” she says. “They’re horrible. Feet are difficult to dissect and they’re often contained inside socks and inside a shoe and by the time you